Introduction
In recent years, various writers have given some thought to the shape of a distinctively Christian social order: What would the world look like if large numbers of people turned to Christ and sought to live out their faith in every sphere of life?
This is an important question for at least two reasons. The first is of particular concern to me, as a Minister in London England: this issue has been almost entirely neglected in contemporary British evangelicalism. While God has blessed us richly in the last century or so with a rediscovery of the priority of biblical preaching, personal faith, evangelism, church planting and so on, we have not given enough thought to the ways in which the gospel should impact the wider structures of society – the life of nations, our educational systems, the media, the law, politics, medicine, the arts, and so on. It’s about time that we did.
Second, these questions about the nature of a Christian social order are not merely peripheral or academic. In the contrary, the answers we give to them will profoundly shape the kinds of decisions we make in many different areas of our lives. They will help us decide how we should educate our children, what kind of political change we ought to work and pray for, how we should vote (and what to expect from even the best candidates if they win), what strategies we should employ as we engage in public life, what kinds of attitudes we ought to have towards our vocations, and a whole range of other questions.
Indeed, almost every major decision (and a good many minor ones) we make in our lives as individuals, families, and churches presupposes some kind of answer to this question, since at its heart it is about the shape of history (past, present and future), and our interpretation of the past and our expectations for the future will necessarily shape our decisions in the present. Life is eschatology.
A neglected question
There is one important issue, however, which has been rather neglected (so far) as we have sought to reformulate our vision of a distinctively Christian social order. The question concerns the role of the church in bringing about the change we seek for. At a superficial level, it appears that the church’s role is far from neglected. Everyone affirms that the church must pray; everyone affirms that it is through the church’s evangelism and witness that people are draw to faith in Christ and begin to display the transformed lives that lie at the heart of the social change we desire; everyone affirms that the church has a vital role as a place of teaching, fellowship, encouragement, and so on; and most importantly of all everyone affirms that it is in response to the church’s prayers that God acts graciously in the world to bring about the social change that we long for. At their best, these affirmations have been self-consciously corporate in focus – that is to say, “the church” has meant not just “That collection of individual Christians who worship at St Ethelwine’s and then head off to pray and evangelise and so on in the hope that that Spirit of God would draw other men and women to faith,” but rather, “That congregation at St Ethelwine’s in response to whose corporate prayer, evangelism and community life the Spirit of God is at work to change the world.”
But this answer, it seems to me, stops short of explicating the full extent of the church’s place in this aspect of the Spirit’s work. In particular, it fails to address explicitly the vital importance of the church’s worship on the Lord’s Day as the first step in God’s plan to renew and re-create the world.
The worst effects of this are seen when Lord’s Day worship is replaced (almost) entirely with evangelistic activities, on the well-intentioned but ultimately misguided assumption that this is the best use of our precious time together if we want to see our communities transformed by the gospel. Of course evangelism is vitally important, but worship is vitally important too, and the two activities are not to be seen as a trade-off, as though doing one would detract from the effectiveness of the other. On the contrary, both are necessary (at different times, in different contexts), and it is in response to both of them (and also, as it happens, in response to the renewal of our relationships within the corporate life of the church) that God works to change the unbelieving world around us.
So what exactly is this missing element? How exactly is the church’s worship related to the Spirit’s work to renew and transform the world? The answer could be put like this: It is as the church gathers in the presence of God, lifted up in the Spirit into the heavenly places in Christ Jesus to worship before the Father, that God is at work both to renew and reorder the relationships between the members of the church and to transform the unbelieving world outside the church by drawing people to faith in Christ and bringing about the broader social change we long for.
To put it most simply, everything begins with worship. A Christian social order has doxological foundations.
What follows is the merest sketch of the kinds of biblical considerations that would feature as part of an extended exploration of this theme. Think of it as a kind of extended, anotated contents page, to be filled in later (or by you yourself, if you want to look up the biblical references and chew them over a little).
Three zones of human life
The Bible teaches that there are three “zones” of human life and relationship, which we might call “Garden,” “Land” and “World.”
- The Garden is a Sanctuary in which the determinative relationships are between us and God;
- the Land is a place of community and fellowship in which the determinative relationships are among the people of God;
- the World is the geographical / conceptual space outside the church where the determinative relationships are between the people of God and the world.
The crucial point that must be grasped is that whatever happens in the Garden/Sanctuary flows through the Land/Church and then out into the World. This is true for both good (blessing, fruitfulness) and evil (cursing, judgment, corruption).
One implication of this is that if we want the Kingdom of God to grow through the World, it is necessary first to address corruption in the Garden/Sanctuary, which will in turn affect the relationships between believers in the Land/Church. Only then will the church start to have a positive impact on the World beyond its walls.
In passing we might note that these three zones correspond to the familiar three offices of Christ, and thus to the three ministries for which people were anointed (i.e. appointed as “Messiahs”, or “anointed ones”) under the older covenants (Priest in the sanctuary, King over the land, Prophet to the world). This might be worth remembering in connection with some of the biblical data below.
A sketch of some biblical data
Here’s a smattering of biblical data, all of which serves (a) to substantiate the basic point about the progress from garden through land to world; and (b) to put flesh on the bones and clarify the significance of this basic point for various issues.
Gen 3-6. The three falls of man.
Gen 3: Adam’s sin in the Sanctuary (rebelled against God). Consequence: cast out from the Sanctuary into the Land (‘adamah, 3:23).
Gen 4: Cain’s sin in the Land (murdered his brother). Consequence: cast out from the Land into the World (“you have driven me today away from the ground [‘adamah] … I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth [‘erets],” 4:14).
Gen 6. Humanity’s sin in the World (Sons of God and daughters of Men).
Note the consequence of this third and decisive sin: the destruction and re-creation of the World (flood; re-creation from water [cf. Gen 1]; new Adam [Noah]; new covenant [Noahic]; renewal of creation mandate; etc. Gen 6-9).
1 Samuel 13-15. The three falls of Saul.
1 Sam 13. Sin in the Sanctuary (unlawful sacrifice; rebellion against God).
1 Sam 14. Sin in the Land (rash vow; sin against Israelite brothers).
1 Sam 15. Sin in the World (failed conquest of Amalekites; sin in the World).
Consequence: Destruction and re-creation (“the Lord has rejected you from being king,” 15:23; Saul replaced with David, the eighth son of Jesse, 1 Sam 16).
You’re starting to get the idea now, I expect, so we can move more quickly through the next couple of examples:
Judges. Idolatry in the Sanctuary (“they served the Baals,” 2:11); disobedience in the Land (“they did not listen to their Judges,” 2:17; sin against brothers); defeat in the World (“he gave them over to plunderers,” 2:14).
1–2 Ki. The decline and fall of Israel. Rebellion in the Sanctuary (idolatry; sin against God); breakdown in the Land (division, conflict, social breakdown; sin against brothers); hostility from the World (conquest, exile).
You can start to see, then, how social and cultural decline follow inevitablty and invariably from cultic apostasy. So then, suppose we found ourselves in a situation where the nation had gone to blazes, and we were wondering what we should do about it? Where would we begin? The answer, I take it, is obvious. Again, there is biblical data aplenty to point us in the right direction:
1 Ki 22-23. Josiah’s reforms are oriented almost exclusively towards the renewal of the Sanctuary (rebuilding the Temple; destroying the High Places and the vessels for Baal-worship; removing the Asherah from the Temple; destroying the houses of the cult prostitutes and the horses and chariots dedicated to the sun and Ahaz’s roof-altars; getting rid of the mediums and necromancers; etc.). Note also the restoration of the Passover; detail in 2 Ch 34-35. All this Sanctuary-focus seemy utterly ludicrous in view of the fact that the major threats seem to be coming from the Land and the World, but once we remember the divinely-ordained order of renewal (Garden-Land-World) it makes complete sense.
Ezra and Nehemiah. The first priority is the rebuilding of the Temple (re-institute worship in the Sanctuary; Ezr); only then is it appropriate to start re-building the city walls (establish security of the Land; Neh). And all this was aimed at the re-establishment of a faithful civilization, a believing culture. It was not an attempt to escape from the world, but to transform the world. (That’s why, in case you were wondering, there is at least as much emphasis on the rebuilding of the gates in Nehemiah as on the rebuilding of the walls, for when the kings of the nations come to seek the LORD at Mount Zion, to hear his law and learn his ways so that they may walk in his paths (Isa 2), they’ll need to enter the city somewhere. And those gates were not just entrances; they were places of civic judgment, where the affairs of the city and the nation were transacted.)
Ezek 47. The restored Temple. The river flows from the Sanctuary (Temple), through the Land, and out into the World (Dead Sea). The allusions to John 4 should be obvious. (See below)
It’s particularly important to note the central place of worship at the heart of God’s plan to re-order a broken and sinful world. For example:
Psalm 67. “May God be gracious to us and bless us … face shine upon us that your way may be known on earth … all nations” (vv. 1-2). Note the vital allusion here to the Aaronic (priestly) blessing found at the conclusion of the (cultic) worship of the people (Num 6; Lev 9). In other words, the people of God come before him in worship, and at the conclusion of their liturgy (Aaronic blessing) they are sent out into the world to begin serving as God’s Spirit-filled agents of change within it. (The chiasm is also extremely instructive; vv. 1-2 // 6-7.)
The people don’t always do it right, of course. For example:
Haggai. The people sinned not merely by dwelling in their “panelled houses” (in itself there’s nothing wrong with this), but by doing so before repairing the Temple (“while this House lies in ruins,” 1:4). They sought to establish themselves in the Land before establishing right worship in the Sanctuary. They got the order wrong, presumptuously imagining that it’s possible to rebuild the relationships within the community before first giving attention to the right ordering of their relationship with God in worship.
So then, how is the work of Christ depicted in the New Covenant? In exactly the same way:
Jn 2-4. Christ’s renewal of the Sanctuary (cleansing the temple, Jn 2); the Land (conversation with Nicodemus his brother, Jn 3); the World (conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jn 4). A full discussion of this important texts would take way too long. Suffice it to note that this section from John 2-4 comes immediately after the recapitulation of the 6-day creation narrative in John 1, which itself articulates how Christ is the one who will re-create the world. This re-creation narrative, however, is very deliberately left incomplete. Look carefully: where’s day 6? And, of course, if day 6 is missing, then that means that by the end of John 1 the day-6-stuff hasn’t hapened yet. And what happened on day 6? You guessed it, the re-creation of humanity. This is left missing from John 1 because the rest of the gospel (beginning with the Grarden-Land-World renewal of John 2-4) is all about the re-creation of humanity in Christ.
(Perhaps there’s even something significant about the ordering of the synoptics: Mt; Mk; Lk. The renewal of humanity in Christ as Priest (Mt; Sanctuary), King (Mk; Land) and Prophet (Lk; World).
There’s a huge amount more that could be said here, but this is a start. It won’t persuade the cynics, but it may give food for thought to the inquisitive.
Making the connection to worship
So then, what does all this have to do with worship? The connections ought by now to be fairly obvious. If we want God to work by his Spirit in the world, then we must not neglect the re-ordering of our sanctuary-worship on the Lord’s Day. Indeed, is is precisely by meeting with God in his presence to renew covenant with him that we call upon him to keep his promises both to re-shape our relationships within the church and to transform the world.
To turn it around another way (and it’s possible to imagine some people for whom it would be necessary to say this, though perhaps not so much here in the UK): if you thought that God was concerned about what we do in which when we gather to worship him, that our worship really is about engaging with God the Father in Christ by the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, then it would be very hard for you to deny that this worship will necessarily have an impact on the world around us. There is no way of “containing” God’s transformative work in the church along the lines of the more radical Two-Kingdom theologies, since once God takes hold of us in worship, he invariably takes hold of our relationships within the church and the church’s relationship with the world too.
This raises numerous further questions, of course, including this one: Given that our worship has such vital importance in relation to the transformation of the world, what biblical guidelines exist that might shape the content and structure of our worship on the Lord’s Day? That’ll have to wait for another day.
